Tea, a poem/Dutch Tea Parties
DUTCH TEA PARTIES.
These fashionable parties were generally consigned to the higher classes, or noblesse, that is to say, such as kept their own cows, and drove their own waggons. The company commonly assembled at three o'clock, and went away about six, unless it was in winter time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might get home before dark. I do not find that they ever treated their company to iced creams, jellies, or syllabubs, or regaled them with musty almonds, mouldy raisins, or sour oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors were fond of more sturdy, substansial fare. The tea table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up in morsels, and swimming in gravy. The company being seated around the genial board, and each furnished with a fork, evinced their dexterity in launching at the fattest pieces in this mighty dish, in much the same manner as sailors harpoon porpoises at sea, or our Indians spear salmon in the lakes. Sometimes the table was graced with immence apple pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetned dough, fried in hog's fat, and balled doughnuts, or oly koeks: a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city. excepting in genuine Dutch families.
The tea was served out of a majestic delft tea-pot, ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs—with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distingushed themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot, from a huge copper tea-kettle, which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degenerate days sweat, merely to look at it. To sweeten the bevrage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup—and the company, alternately nibbled and sipped with the greatest decorom, until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and econimic old lady, which was, to suspend a large lump directly over the tea table, by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth,—an ingenious expedient, which is still kept up by some families in Albany; but which prevails without exception in Communipaw, Bergen, Flat-Bush, and all our uncontaminated Dutch villages.
At these primitive tea parties the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coqueting—no gamboling of old ladies, nor hoyden chattering and romping of young ones—no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen, with their brains in their pockets; nor amusing conceits, and monky, divertisements of smart young gentlemen with no brains at all. On the contrary, the young ladies seated themselves, demurly in their rush bottomed chairs, and knit their own woollen stockings; nor ever opened their lips, excepting to say yah Mynheer or yah ya Vrouw, to any question that was asked them; behaving in all things, like decent well educated damsels. As to the gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe, and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles, with which the fire places were decorated; wherin sundry passages of Scripture were piously pourtrayed: Tobet and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire.
The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were carried home by their own carriages, that is to say, by the vehicles nature had provided them, except such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a waggon. The gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to their respective abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at the door: which, as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in perfect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at that time, nor should it at the present—if our great grandfathers approved of the custom, it would argue a great want of reverence in their descendants to say a word against it.
